46 The New York Reviewtypically take the form of complaints
about injustice. In Disrespect (2000),
Honneth explains that “what we might
conceive of as a striving for social rec-
ognition initially appears in a negative
form, namely as the experience of hu-
miliation or disrespect.” We gain a
deepened understanding of recognition
when it is withheld, and we can best ap-
preciate the central place of recognition
in our social world if we turn our atten-
tion to cases where it has been applied
only selectively or has failed altogether.
Although this may strike us as a pecu-
liar way for a philosopher to go about
developing a model of social justice, the
appeal to the negative is a defining fea-
ture of political philosophy in the post-
Hegelian style. If we are to be effective
in our efforts to criticize and improve
the society we inhabit, our standards for
criticism must have some traction on so-
ciety, and this traction comes from see-
ing not how society has succeeded but
how it has violated its own standards.
The theory of recognition is clearly
relevant to how we think about his-
torical cases such as the civil rights
movement in the United States or the
campaign for the extension of legal
rights to gays and lesbians as well as
other marginalized groups. But what
is perhaps most striking in Honneth’s
argument is the way in which it inter-
weaves the more conventional and
institutional concerns of political phi-
losophy (in our legal and constitutional
arrangements, for instance) with an
awareness of the informal, affective di-
mension of human experience.
Nancy Fraser has argued that the
focus on recognition has the unfortu-
nate effect of turning critical theory
toward “culturalist” themes, while ig-
noring problems of economics and re-
distribution. Honneth’s response is that
even the call for redistribution must
appeal to an underlying recognition of
social suffering. Though he acknowl-
edges the demand for economic redis-
tribution, he worries that the emphasis
on modifying institutions may lead us
to neglect what he calls “the everyday,
still unthematized, but no less press-
ing embryonic form of social misery.”
If critical theory is to remain a com-
prehensive theory of social freedom,
it must attend to formal structures of
power, but it should not overlook the
“everyday dimension of moral feelings
of injustice” that animate our calls for
structural change.
Consider the slogan “Black Lives
Matter,” in which minimalist descrip-
tion becomes a moral demand. For this
campaign, legal redress is absolutely
necessary, but that is only one facet
of the broader effort to ensure that
African Americans are recognized as
agents fully deserving of respect and
the conditions necessary for justice and
fulfillment in their lives. Such cases
illustrate how, even in the struggle for
formal rights in law or in campaigns for
economic equality, we are guided by
informal intuitions about what we be-
lieve is due to all members of our soci-
ety. Honneth is convinced that calls for
social betterment cannot be construed
only in an institutional and economic
sense. In The Idea of Socialism he ar-
gues that socialism must be freed from
“the shackles of nineteenth- century
thought,” in which it was conceived as
the animating cause of an existing eco-
nomic class that could rely on a narrative
of historical progress. It must adopt a
strategy of “historical experimentalism”that remains open to the ever- changing
array of diverse voices and needs.Honneth’s most recent book, Recog-
nition, is based on the Seeley Lectures
that he delivered in 2017 at the Centre
for Political Thought at Cambridge
University. It is not so much an original
statement or an advance in his philo-
sophical arguments as an accessible
introduction to the themes that have
preoccupied him throughout his career.
Here Honneth adopts a more modest
approach as a historian of ideas, explor-
ing how recognition was conceived in
three distinct intellectual traditions—
French, British, and German.
The comparative approach is instruc-
tive, not least because we come to see
that national cultures seem to have
construed social interaction in nota-bly different ways. In the French case,
Rousseau expresses the fear that we
risk losing a sense of our authentic self-
hood when we live only “in the opinion
of others” and succumb to the passion
of “amour propre.” A similar anxiety
can be found much later in the philoso-
phy of Sartre, who feared that one’s en-
counter with the other can only end in
self- loss and would not yield a more ex-
pansive sense of one’s humanity. From
these two examples Honneth draws the
broad generalization of a cultural bias
in French social thought that inhibited
the development of a more positive as-
sessment of intersubjectivity.
In the British tradition, Honneth be-
gins with David Hume and his notion
of “sympathy,” then turns to the rather
more sophisticated moral theory of
Adam Smith, before concluding with
a discussion of John Stuart Mill. All
three shared a favorable understand-
ing of the importance of recognition
in social interaction even if they didn’t
employ that term. Smith, for example,
developed a theory of the “impartial
spectator” as our higher conscience,
the internal representative of what
Honneth calls the “generalized other.”
Later, in the nineteenth century, Mill
came to see that the social bond that
holds a community together is (in Hon-
neth’s phrase) “woven from the fabric
of mutual recognition,” but he con-
ceived of this bond chiefly in negative
terms: if we are inclined to respect the
will of the community, this is due to
what he called “the fear of displeasure
from our fellow creatures.” Dreading
the possibility of public censure or
expulsion, the individual adheres tocollective norms and also gains a more
expansive sense of its own purposes. For
Honneth, the British strand in this story
is distinctive in that it sees recognition
as primarily a psychological fact about
why we adhere to the norms we do.
Honneth is a charitable reader who
sees merit in all three strands of his-
torical discussion, and he succeeds in
braiding them together into a stronger,
more general theory. All the same, it’s
clear that he regards the German con-
tribution as the most persuasive, since
only in the German tradition did the
idea of recognition assume a central
place as an explanation for how we
become both rational and free. Kant
furnished the guiding thought that
persons deserve respect because they
represent (in Honneth’s words) “liv-
ing examples of the effort required to
follow the moral demands of reason.”
This intuition inspired Fichte to claim
that respect means a reciprocal ac-
knowledgment of our capacity for free-
dom: “One cannot treat the other as a
free being, if both do not mutually treat
each other as free.”
But it was left to Hegel to argue
that “being with oneself in another”
is not only an event that occurs be-
tween selves but must also assume an
enduring form in the full range of so-
cial institutions that comprise our life
together. Law, for instance, is not a
mere system of constraints that should
be minimized so that we enjoy a max-
imum of liberty for pursuing our own
ends. It is a structure that also trans-
forms who we are and assists us in real-
izing this broadened conception of our
own nature. Borrowing from the Hegel
scholar Frederick Neuhouser, Honneth
sees this institutional requirement as
necessary for “social freedom.” With
this idea he marks his allegiance to a
long tradition in political philosophy
that harks back to Aristotle’s view of
human beings as political animals who
flourish only when institutional condi-
tions permit them to realize who they
are. We are truly free only when our
social world is not an external obstruc-
tion but our own “second nature,” an
external manifestation of our higher
aims. Needless to say, this idea of so-
cial freedom has little in common
with the dominant tradition of Anglo-
American liberal political thought that
places a premium on individual liberty.
In defending the idea of social free-
dom, Honneth has helped us to appre-
ciate the limits of liberalism.
A skeptic might ask why such a proj-
ect would have any value beyond the
circuits of academic debate. The an-
swer is that Honneth is not only a phi-
losopher for philosophy’s sake. He has
given formal shape to a deep intuition
that permeates our everyday experi-
ence, even if it often remains unthe-
matized. The intuition is a simple one
but is too easily missed, especially in
a world that prizes the self- made indi-
vidual and sees our social reality only
as an external constraint. We need rec-
ognition from others as a condition for
being ourselves. We need it not only
in the innermost spheres of love and
friendship but also in the outermost
reaches of public life, where it assumes
an institutional form. Recognition, we
might say, is a dynamic force that quick-
ens our institutions and prevents them
from hardening into an unresponsive
mass. The right to vote, for example, is
not only a matter of law; it is an expres-
sion of recognition for others as agentsJürgen Habermas;
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